[On her and husband Michael Dorris:] We both have title collections. I think a title is like a magnet. It begins to draw these scraps of experience or conversation or memory to it. Eventually, it collects a book.

Women are strong, strong, terribly strong. We don't know how strong until we are pushing out our babies. We are too often treated like babies having babies when we should be in training, like acolytes, novices to high priestesshood, like serious applicants for the space program.

I feel myself becoming less a person than a place, inhabited, a foreign land.

By the time I was done with the car it looked worse than any typical Indian car that has been driven all its life on reservation roads, which they always say are like government promises - full of holes.

You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart.

I spend most of my time writing.

There are ways of being abandoned even when your parents are right there.